OSX features

You can use Apple speech commands within the text to change pronunciation, add
silent annotations and other voice features.

You can send a voice to an Airplay device like an Apple TV.

Automatic voice switching is activated for new Yosemite languages and voices.

When you finish making an .aiff or .m4a file, the extension notifies you with
the name of the file and the voice used in the notifications area. The system
notification can also show if there is an error – for example, if you try to
create a sound file in an unsupported format.

Better security. The text of the selection cannot be incorrectly interpreted
by an OSA script.

Ubuntu features

Checks that a speech engine is installed on the first run, and advises you if
there is none.

If you have installed the Pico voice engine, the system will suggest using
that engine instead of espeak

Clicking the system settings icon in the About menu opens the Ubuntu System
Settings control panel.

If your installed Ubuntu system includes “notify-send” then the extension
gives you a visual alert if you are creating a sound file and the --audio=false
(silent) python switch is used. The visual alert shows you the name of the sound
file. The system will now show a visual indication if there is an error creating
the sound file.

If you have installed avconv, then you can create a .webm movie with a poster
image and the sound of the spoken text. On the most recent Ubuntu releases,
avconv replaces ffmpeg.

Festival scripts for Catalan and other languages do not include options
specific to English speakers.

Windows

Uses ISO speech encoding for Windows versions newer than Vista.

Shows a dialog after you export spoken text as a sound file.

Bug fixes

Extension is now able to detect new multilingual Mac OSX voices.

The avconv and ffmpeg installation test is consistent for different voice
engines.

Options for python that no longer work in the newest version of MacOSX and
Ubuntu Linux are gone.

Code is optimized to reduce time generating voice options. Code for
determining Festivox voices on Linux and Windows is shared.

Hackerspace has an article entitled "Highlight and Google Translate Any Text in Linux" by Victor Clark which outlines how you can get instant translations from Google using a bash script with Ubuntu. This article tells how you can get similar functionality using Read Text Extension and LibreOffice on the Apple OSX desktop platform. The apple script is not as elegant or concise as the HackerSpace hack, but it gets the job done.

Create the following script and export it as a text script entitled notifytr.applescript.

#/usr/osascript

-- Translate a phrase to English and display it in a notification like

To use the script with LibreOffice, install the Read Text Extension, then set up the Tools - Add-ons - Read Selection... menu as shown. In the Read with an external program box, enter the path to osascript. In the Command line options box, enter the path to the script followed by the "(TMP)" token. For example, for a user named "username" the command line options might look like: '/Users/username/Desktop/notifytr.applescript' '(TMP)' (Be sure to use a Unix shell type path description as shown above.)

Now, when you click OK, the Desktop shows a notification instead of reading the text aloud. To return the settings to their defaults, type some random characters into the Read with an external program box, and click OK. The program will show an error message and reset the dialogue to the default settings.

Set the script to executable by right clicking it and selecting Properties - Permissions - Allow Executing File as a Program

You can set a system key shortcut to initiate the script. You can also use Read Text Extension to translate the highlighted text following the steps below.

Use the following script and save it as seltr.sh. The script below differs from the original script. it takes the language to translate to from the system language environment instead of just defaulting to English. It uses https instead of http for added security. The script also uses a LibreOffice notification icon.

To use the script with LibreOffice, install the Read Text Extension, then set up the Tools - Add-ons - Read Selection... menu as shown. In the Read with an external program box, enter the path to the script. In the illustration "Powered by Google™" was entered into the Command line optionsbox -- the bash script ignores the options in this box, so you could enter any random text.

Now, when you click OK, the Desktop shows a notification instead of reading the text aloud. To return the settings to their defaults, type some random characters into the Read with an external program box, and click OK. The program will show an error message and reset the dialogue to the default settings.

Read Text 0.8.16 for LibreOffice and Read Text 0.8.17 for Apache OpenOffice now show a Catalan voice option in the application dialogue if a Catalan voice is installed.

Ubuntu LInux 14.04 includes the Festival Catalan voice option in the package manager. To install the Ona Catalan voice and the programs it depends on, download "Catalan Speaker for Festival" using the Ubuntu Software Centre. You can also install festvox-ca-ona-hts using a command in the terminal or Synaptic package manager. For example, if you have administrator privileges, you can open a command terminal, and type:

sudo apt-get install festvox-ca-ona-hts

Once you have installed festvox-ca-ona-hts, open the Read Text dialogue using Tools - Add-ons - Read Text... Click the Festival option from the External Program section, and choose an option that includes the (voice_upc_ca_ona_hts) option in the script.

If you do not install the most recent version of the Read Text Extension, you can use the instructions that Carlos López posted in "Com fer que LibreOffice parli en català" on the Cerrepero Things web site. His instructions refer to Edubuntu, but the instructions should work in other flavours of Ubuntu as well.

The Catalan voice projectwas created by theTALP Research Center, Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. To create the voice, a male and a female speaker each read ten hours of Catalan text from a wide variety of sources. The data and recordings were used to create several Catalan Festival voices. The raw resources are available online and are licensed under a BSD license so that they are freely available for research and commercial use. The process of how the voices were created are described in a paper entitled Corpus and Voices for Catalan Speech Synthesis by Antonio Bonafonte, Jordi Adell, Ignasi Esquelinkarra, Silvia Gallego, Asuncion Moreno, and Javier Pérez.

Glossary

Edubuntu - A version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution designed for school use.

Make
ALT+R a shortcut for Read Selection

Applies
to: LibreOffice.org for Linux or Windows 4.2.7 (or newer).

You
can use Tools
- Customize - Keyboard to
add keyboard shortcuts to the LibreOffice application.

If you are using an English version of the application, you can include Read text
extension shortcuts for Writer, Presentation, Draw, Calc and Web
Writer quickly and easily with the attached configuration file. Note
that if you replace the existing registry modifications file with the
attached file, you will lose all other custom settings and your file
history.

You need
to replace the local settings file. In Ubuntu Linux 14.04, this is located
at $HOME/.config/libreoffice/4/user/registrymodifications.xcu

The Apple OSX Yosemite 10.10 release includes new regional languages and voices. The read text extension works well in English with the voice of Alex, however you may run into a problem if you are trying to use a different language. The problem seems to be due to a bug in the speech command in the terminal. With OSX Mavericks and earlier releases, using the terminal command say --voice ? would list installed voices on the computer. With OSX Yosemite, the same command includes voices that are not installed on your computer. As a result, when using the default settings for Read Text, the extension is unable to determine which voices are actually installed.

There appears to be a couple of ways to work around the problem.

Option 1 - Dictation and Speech - Find voices that work

Open the control panel and choose the Dictation & Speech dialog. For each language or region, try the first voice in the alphabetical list.

For French from France (fr-FR), try Audrey instead of Aurelie, Virginie or Thomas, because Audrey is closest to the beginning of the alphabet.

If your region is not listed, use a region with a similar dialect to your own. For example, there is no item for Spanish from the United States, but Angelica, a voice that speaks Mexican Spanish (es-MX), would be close.

Option 2 - Always use the default language

In the Read Text setup dialog, use /usr/bin/say in the Read with an external program box and -f (TMP) in the Command line options box.

You can change the voice using the Dictation & Speech Control Panel, but the voice will not change automatically depending on language.

A bug report for say --voice ? has been filed with Apple. The bug report number is18689412 .

Animacao LibreOffice

Ricardo Graçais a Brazilian artist, author and animator who uses open source software to produce art and animation. He gives workshops on animation, photography and open source software.

In July 2014, he completed a video animation for LibreOffice Brasil promoting the software, and featuring twelve LibreOffice extensions including Read Text.

The original video is in Brazilian Portuguese, and has been translated into Spanish and English. The original source files are available on the web site and released under a copyleft license so that others can use the files to learn about animation or to translate the clip into other languages. It's truly an open source project! Ricardo has created several animations describing how to use open source software to create animation, and has released a companion book called Produzindo animações com softwares livres. It's available in digital format at Kobo and Amazon book stores or in PDF format at his site.

LibreOffice settings can become corrupt if your computer gets turned off suddenly or if there is an error on your hard disk. If the settings files are corrupt in LibreOffice, you may not be able to use, install, delete or update extensions. To reset the local settings, you remove the settings directory.

Quit LibreOffice.

Open the Command Prompt (terminal) application.

It will open in your home directory.

Type cd AppData.

Type cd Roaming.

Type rmdir /s LibreOffice.

Type y, then return.

Restart LibreOffice.

Wait a few seconds for the application to rebuild the settings directory and set the default settings.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was released in April, 2014. The LTS designation stands for "Long Term Support" - meaning that security and performance updates will be available for five years. Ubuntu 14.04 uses version 4.2.3.3 of LibreOffice. Read Text Extension 0.8.12 works well with this version, but there are a few issues to be aware of.

If you are upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 from Ubuntu 12.04, settings and extensions may not transfer. You may need to download the extensions again. This is a good opportunity to update extensions to their newest versions. Some older extensions may not be compatible with the newest version of LibreOffice. Check with the publisher of an extension if you have problems.

Ubuntu 14.04 does not include either espeak or svox pico speech by default. If you want to user read text extension for speech synthesis, you should install them using sudo apt-get install espeak libttspico0 libttspico-utils libttspico-data When you have installed espeak, you can test the functionality with espeak "hello world"

Read Text Extension has been updated. This update adds a function that checks for UNDEFINED language text. This corrects an error determining WESTERN language of selected text.

Undefined language may include ambiguous language, code or resource locations.

When the document selection was western text, the language of the selected text was interpreted as the language of the user interface. This has been corrected to the actual language of the selected text.